work do not show the least resemblance to the known portrait of
Theodosia, and it is also lamentable to find that the art dealer, in
his sweet account of his find, fell into all the vulgar misconceptions
and blunders as regards his subject and the tales of her demise. But,
while both these portrait yarns may be dismissed without further
attention, they have undoubtedly served to keep the old and enchanting
story before modern eyes.
In the light of analysis the prosaic explanation of the Theodosia Burr
case seems to be the acceptable one. The boat on which she embarked
was small and frail. At the very time it must have been passing the
treacherous region of Cape Hatteras, there was a storm of sufficient
violence to scatter the heavy British frigates and ships of the line.
The fate of a little schooner in such weather is almost a matter for
assurance. Yet of certainty there can be none. The famous daughter
of the traditional American villain--the devil incarnate to all the
melancholy crew of hypocritical pulpiteers and propagandists--went down
to sea in her cockleshell and returned no more. Eleven decades have
lighted no candle in the darkness that engulfed her.
III
THE VANISHED ARCHDUKE
One of the most engrossing of modern mysteries is that which hides
the final destination of Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria, better
known to a generation of newspaper readers as John Orth. In the dawn
of July 13, 1890, the bark _Santa Margarita_,[2] flying the flag of an
Austrian merchantman, though her owner and skipper was none other than
this wandering scion of the imperial Hapsburgs, set sail from Ensenada,
on the southern shore of the great estuary of the Plata, below Buenos
Aires, and forthwith vanished from the earth. With her went Johann
Salvator, his variety-girl wife and a crew of twenty-six. Though
search has been made in every thinkable port, through the distant
archipelagoes of the Pacific, in ten thousand outcast towns, and though
emissaries have visited all the fabled refuges of missing men, from
time to time, over a period of nearly forty years, no sight of any one
connected with the lost ship has ever been got, and no man knows with
certainty what fate befell her and her princely master.
[2] Sometimes written Sainte Marguerite.
The enigma of his passing is not the only circumstance of curious
doubt and romantic coloration that hedges the career of this imperial
adventurer. His story, from the beginning, is one marked with dramatic
incidents. As much of it as bears upon the final episode will have to
be related.
The Archduke Johann Salvator was born at Florence on the twenty-fifth
day of November, 1852, the youngest son of Grand Duke Leopold II of
Tuscany, and Maria Antonia of the Two Sicilies. He was, accordingly,
a second cousin of the late Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary.
At the baptismal font young Johann received enough names to carry any
man blissfully through life, his full array having been Johann Nepomuk
Salvator Marie Josef Jean Ferdinand Balthazar Louis Gonzaga Peter
Alexander Zenobius Antonin.
Archduke Johann was still a child when the Italian revolutionists
drove out his father and later united Tuscany to the growing kingdom
of Victor Emanuel. So the hero of this account was reared in Austria
and educated for the army. Commissioned as a stripling, he rose rapidly
in rank for reasons quite other than his family connections. The young
prince was endowed with a good mind and notable for independence
of thought. He felt, as he expressed it, that he ought to earn his
pay, an opinion which led to indefatigable military studies and some
well-intentioned, but ill-advised writings. First, the young archduke
discovered what he considered faults in the artillery, and he wrote a
brochure on the subject. The older heads didn’t like it and had him
disciplined. Later on, Johann made a study of military organization and
wrote a well-known pamphlet called “Education or Drill,” wherein he
attacked the old method of training soldiers as automatons and advised
the mental development of the rank and file, in line with policies now
generally adopted. But such advanced ideas struck the military masters
of fifty years ago as bits of heresy and anarchy. Archduke Johann
was disciplined by removal from the army and the withdrawal of his
commission. At thirty-five he had reached next to the highest possible
rank and been cashiered from it. This in 1887.
Johann Salvator had, however, been much more than a progressive soldier
man. He was an accomplished musician, composer of popular waltzes, an
oratorio and the operetta “Les Assassins.” He was an historian and
publicist, of eminent official standing at least, having collaborated
with Crown Prince Rudolf in the widely distributed work, “The
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture,” which was published in
1886. He was also a distinguished investigator of psychic phenomena,
his library on this subject having been the most complete in Europe--a
fact suggestive of something abnormal.
Personally the man was both handsome and charming. He was, in spite
of imperial rank and military habitude, democratic, simple, friendly,
and unaffected. He liked to live the life of a gentleman, with diverse
interests in life, now playing the gallant in Vienna--to the high world
of the court and the half world of the theater by turns; again retiring
to his library and his studies, sometimes vegetating at his country
estates and working on his farms. Official trammels and the rigid
etiquette of the ancient court seemed to irk him. Still, he seems to
have suffered keen chagrin over his dismissal from the army.
Johann Salvator had, from adolescence, been a close personal friend
of the Austrian crown prince. This intimacy had extended even to
participation in some of the personal and sentimental escapades for
which the ill-starred Rudolf was remarkable. Apparently the two men
hardly held an opinion apart, and it was accepted that, with the death
of the aging emperor and the accession of his son, Johann Salvator
would be a most powerful personage.
Suddenly, in 1889, all these high hopes and promises came to earth.
After some rumblings and rumorings at Schoenbrunn, it was announced
that Johann Salvator had petitioned the emperor for permission to
resign all rank and title, sever his official connection with the royal
house, and even give up his knighthood in the Order of the Golden
Fleece. The petitioner also asked for the right to call himself Johann
Orth, after the estate and castle on the Gmündensee, which was the
favorite abode of the prince and of his aged mother. All these requests
were officially granted and confirmed by the emperor, and so the man
John Orth came into being.
The first of the two Orth mysteries lies concealed behind the official
records of this strange resignation from rank and honor. Even to-day,
after Orth has been missing for a whole generation, after all those who
might have been concerned in keeping secret the motives and measures of
those times have been gathered to the dust, and after the empire itself
has been dissolved into its defeated components, the facts in the
matter cannot be stated with any confidence. There are two principal
versions of the affair, and both will have to be given so that the
reader may make his own choice. The popular or romantic account
deserves to be considered first.
In the eighties the stage of Vienna was graced by several handsome
young women of the name Stübel. One of them, Lori, achieved
considerable operatic distinction. Another sailed to New York with
her brother and appeared in operetta and in musical comedy at the old
Casino. The youngest of these sisters was Ludmilla Stübel, commonly
called Millie, and on that account sometimes, erroneously, Emilie.
This daring and charming girl began her career in a Viennese operetta
chorus and rose to the rank of principal. She was not, so far as I
can gather from the contemporary newspapers, remarkable for voice or
dramatic ability, but her “surpassingly voluptuous beauty and piquant
manners” won her almost limitless attention and gave her a popularity
that reached across the Atlantic. In the middle eighties Fräulein
Stübel appeared at the Thalia Theater in the Bowery, New York, then the
shrine of German comic opera in the United States, creating the rôles
of _Bettina_ in “The Mascot” and _Violette_ in “The Merry War.”
The _New York Herald_, reviewing her American career a few years
later, said: “In New York she became somewhat notorious for her risqué
costumes. On one occasion Fräulein Stübel attended the Arion Ball in
male costume, and created a scene when ejected. This conduct seems to
have ended her career in the United States.”
This beautiful and spirited plebeian swam into the ken of Johann
Salvator, of Austria, in the fall of 1888, when that impetuous prince
had already been dismissed from the army and his other affairs were
gathering to the storm that broke some months afterward. Catastrophic
events followed rapidly.
[Illustration: ~~ MILLIE STÜBEL ~~]
In January, 1889, Prince Rudolf was found dead in the hunting lodge
at Mayerling, with the Baroness Marie Vetsera, to whom the heir of a
hundred kings is said to have been passionately devoted, and with whom
he may have died in a suicide pact, though it has been said the crown
prince and his sweetheart were murdered by persons whose identity
has been sedulously concealed. This mysterious fatality robbed the
dispirited Johann Salvator of his closest and most powerful friend. It
may have had a good deal to do with what followed.
A few months later Johann Salvator married morganatically his stage
beauty. It was now, after the lapse of a few months, that he resigned
all rank, title, and privileges, left Austria with his wife, and
married her civilly in London.
Naturally enough, it has generally been held that the death of the
crown prince and the romance with the singer explained everything. The
archduke, in disgrace with the army, bereft of his truest and most
illustrious friend, and deeply infatuated with a girl whom he could
not fully legitimatize as his wife, so long as he wore the purple of
his birth, had decided to “surrender all for love” and seek solace in
foreign lands with the lady of his choice. This interpretation has all
the elements of color and sweetness needed for conviction in the minds
of the sentimental. Unfortunately, it does not seem to bear skeptical
examination.
Even granting that Archduke Johann Salvator was a man of independent
mind and quixotic temperament, that he was embittered by his demotion
from military rank, and that he must have been greatly depressed by the
death of Rudolf, who was both his bosom friend and his most powerful
intercessor at court, no such extreme proceeding as the renunciation of
all rank and the severing of family ties was called for.
It is true, too, that the loss of his only son through an affair with a
woman of inferior rank, had embittered Franz Josef and probably caused
the monarch to look with uncommon harshness upon similar liaisons among
the members of the Hapsburg family. Undoubtedly the morganatic marriage
of his second cousin with the shining moth of the theater displeased
the monarch and widened the breach between him and his kinsman; but it
must be remembered that Johann Salvator was only a distant cousin; that
he was not even remotely in line for succession to the throne; that he
had already been deprived of military or other official connection with
the government; and that affairs of this kind have been by no means
rare among Hapsburg scions.
Dour and tyrannical as the emperor may have been, he was no
Anglo-Saxon, no moralist. His own life had not been quite free of
sentimental episodes, and he was, after all, the heir to the proudest
tradition in all Europe, head of the world’s oldest reigning house, and
a believer in the sacredness of royal rank. He must have looked upon a
morganatic union as something not uncommon or specially disgraceful,
whereas a renunciation of rank and privilege can only have struck him
as a precedent of the gravest kind.
Thus, Johann Salvator did not need to take any extreme step because
of his histrionic wife. He might have remained in Austria happily
enough, aside from a few snubs and the exclusion from further official
participation in politics. He might have gone to any country in Europe
and become the center of a distinguished society. His children would
probably have been ennobled, and even his wife eventually given the
same sort of recognition that was accorded the consorts of other
princes in similar case, notably the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose
assassination at Sarajevo precipitated the World War. Instead, Johann
Salvator made the most complete and unprecedented severance from all
that seemed most inalienably his. Historians have had to interpret this
action in another light, and their explanation forms the second version
of the incident, probably the true one.
In 1887, as a result of one of the interminable struggles for hegemony
in the Balkans, Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha had been elected Prince
of Bulgaria, but Russia had refused to recognize this sovereign, and
the other powers, out of deference to the Czar, had likewise refrained
from giving their approval. Austria was in a specially delicate
position as regards this matter. She was the natural rival of Russia
for dominance in the Balkans, but her statesmen did not feel strong
enough openly to oppose the Russian course. Besides, they had their
eyes fixed on Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ferdinand had been an officer in
the Austrian army. He was well liked at Franz Josef’s court, and stood
high in the regard of Crown Prince Rudolf. What is most germane to the
present question is that he was the friend of Johann Salvator.
In 1887, and for a number of years following, Russia attempted to
drive the unwelcome German princeling from the Bulgarian throne by
various military cabals, acts of brigandage, diplomatic intrigues,
and the like. Naturally the young ruler’s friends in other countries
rallied to his aid. Among them was Johann Salvator. It is known that he
interceded with Rudolf for Ferdinand, and he may have approached the
emperor. Failing to get action at Vienna, he is said to have formed a
plan of a military character which was calculated to force the hands
of Austria, Germany, and England, bringing them into the field against
Russia, to the end that Ferdinand might be recognized and more firmly
seated. The plot was discovered in time, according to those who hold
this theory of the incident, and Johann Salvator came under the most
severe displeasure of the emperor.
It is asserted by those who have studied the case dispassionately, that
Johann Salvator’s rash course was one that came very near involving
Austria in a Russian war, and that the most emphatic exhibitions of
the emperor’s reprehension and anger were necessary. Accordingly, it
is said, Franz Josef demanded the surrender of all rank and privileges
by his cousin and exiled him from the empire for life. Here, at least,
is a story of a more probable character, inasmuch as it presents
provocation for the unprecedented harshness with which Archduke Johann
Salvator was treated. No doubt his morganatic marriage and his other
conflicts with higher authority were seized upon as disguises under
which to hide the secret diplomatic motive.
Louisa, the runaway crown princess of Saxony, started a tale to the
effect that her cousin, Johann Salvator, had torn the Order of the
Golden Fleece from his breast in a rage and thrown it at the emperor,
which thing can not have happened since the negotiations between the
emperor and his recreant cousin were conducted at a distance through
official emissaries or by mail.
Again, the Countess Marie Larisch, niece of the Empress Elizabeth,
recounts even more fantastic yarns. She says in so many words that
Crown Prince Rudolf was in a conspiracy with Johann Salvator and others
to seize the crown of Hungary away from the emperor and so establish
Rudolf as king before his time. It was fear of discovery in this plot,
she continues, that led to the suicide of Rudolf. A few days after
Mayerling, she recites, she delivered to Johann Salvator a locked box
(apparently containing secret papers) on a promenade in the mist and he
kissed her hand, exclaimed that she had saved his life--and more in the
same strain.
Both these elevated ladies, it will be recalled, wrote or talked in
self-justification and with the usual stupidity of the guilty. We may
dismiss their yarns as mere women’s gabble and return to the solid
fact that Johann Salvator, impetuous, a little mad and smarting under
his military humiliations, tried to mix into Balkan politics with the
result that he found himself in the position of a bungling interloper,
almost a betrayer of his country’s interests.
Less than two years ago some further light was thrown upon the affair
of the missing archduke through what have passed as letters taken
from the Austrian archives after the fall of the Hapsburgs. These
letters were published in various European and American newspapers
and journals and they may be, as asserted, the veritable official
documents. The portions I quote are taken from the Sunday Magazine of
the _New York World_ of January 10 and January 17, 1926. I must remark
that I regard them with suspicion.
The first letter purports to be a report on the violent misconduct of
Johann Salvator at Venice, as follows:
“Consul General Alexander, Baron Warsberg, to the Minister of Foreign
Affairs, Count Kalnoky:
“I regarded it to be my duty to obtain information about the relations
and meetings of Archduke Johann, and am sorry to have to report
to Your Excellency that, _in a rather unworthy manner_, he had
intercourse on board and in public with a _lady lodged on board of
the yacht_, which intercourse has not remained unobserved and which
he could not be induced to veil in spite of the remonstrances of (the
President of the Chamber) Baron de Fin--Baron de Fin was so offended
that, after much quarrel and trouble which made him ill, he left the
ship and lodged in a little inn. He, on his part, reported to His
Majesty the Emperor, and the Archduke is said to have, after five
months of silence, written for the first time to His Majesty in order
to complain of his Chamberlain. This unpleasant situation, still more
troublesome abroad than it would have been at home, has been solved
last Sunday, the 20th inst, by the sudden advent of Field Marshal
Lieut. Count Uxküll, who brought the Imperial Order that His Imperial
Highness immediately return to Orth at the Sea of Gmünden--to which he
immediately submitted.
“Baron de Fin, who is still living here and is on friendly terms with
me, can give to the Archduke no certificate that would be bad enough.
According to his experience and observation, His Highness does not
know any other interests in the world than those of his person, and
even this only in the common sense; that he, for instance, wished to
ascend the throne of Bulgaria, not out of enthusiasm for the people
or for the political idea but only in order to lose the throne after
a short time and in this way to be freed from the influence of His
Majesty, the Emperor. Baron de Fin pretends that there would be
no other means to cure that completely undisciplined and immoral
character but by dismissing him formally from the imperial family and
by allowing him, as it is his desire, to enjoy under an adopted name,
that liberty that he pretends to deem as the highest good. He believes
him (the Archduke) to have such a 'dose’ of pride that he would return
with a penitent heart, if he then would be treated according to his
new rank. I also have observed this haughtiness of the Prince despite
his talks of liberalism.”
Then follows what may well have been the recreant archduke’s letter of
abdication, thus:
“Your Majesty:
“My behavior for nearly two years will have convinced Your Majesty
that, abstaining from all interests that did not concern me, I
have lived in retirement in the endeavor to remove Your Majesty’s
displeasure with me.
“Being too young to rest forever and too proud to live as a paid
idler, my situation has become painful, even intolerable, to me.
Checked by a justified pride from asking for re-employment in the
army, I had the alternative either to continue the unworthy existence
of a princely idler or--as an ordinary human being, to seek a new
existence, a new profession. I was finally urged to a decision in the
latter sense, as my whole nature refused to fit into the frame of my
position and my personal independence must be compensation for what I
have lost.
“I therefore resign voluntarily, and respectfully return the titles
and rights of an Archduke, as well as my military title into the hands
of Your Majesty, but request Your Majesty submissively to deign to
grant me a civil name.
“Far from my fatherland, I shall seek a purpose in life, and my
livelihood probably at sea, and try to find a humble but honorable
position. If, however, Your Majesty should call your subjects to arms,
Your Highness will permit me to return home and--though only as a
common soldier--to devote my life to Your Majesty.
“Your Majesty may deign to believe me that this step was only impeded
by the thought of giving offense to Your Majesty--Your Majesty to
whose Highness I am particularly and infinitely indebted and devoted
from the bottom of my heart. But as I have to pay for this step dearly
enough--with my entire social existence, with all that means hope and
future--Your Majesty will pardon
“Your Majesty’s Most Loyally Obedient Servant,
“ARCHDUKE JOHANN, FML.”
Whether one cousin would use such a tone to another, even an emperor,
is a question which every reader must consider for himself, quite
as he must decide whether grown sons of kings were capable of such
middle-class sentiment.
There follows the reply of Franz Josef which has the ring of
genuineness:
“DEAR ARCHDUKE JOHANN:
“In compliance with your request addressed to me, I feel induced to
decide the following:
“1. I sanction your renunciation of the right of being regarded and
treated as a Prince of the Imperial House, and permit you to adopt a
civil name, which you are to bring to my notice after you have made
your choice.
“2. I consent to your resigning your commission as an officer and
relieve you at the same time of your responsibility for the Corps
Artillery Regiment No. 2.
“3. I decide at the same time that you are to be struck out of the
'Knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece.’
“4. In disposing the suspension of your appenage (Civil List) from
my court donation, I will inform your brother Archduke Ferdinand
of Tuscany of the suspension of your share out of the family funds
proceeds.
“5. Without my express permission you are forbidden to pass the
frontiers of the monarchy from your residence abroad for a permanent
or even a temporary stay in Austria. Finally,
“6. You are to sign the written declaration which the bearer of this,
my manuscript will submit to you for this purpose and which he is
charged to return to me after the signature is affixed.
“FRANZ JOSEF.”
“Vienna, Oct. 12, 1889.”
Some correspondence followed on the subject of John Orth’s retention of
his Austrian citizenship, which the emperor wished at first to deny him.
In any event, Johann Salvator, Archduke of Austria, and Prince of
Tuscany, became John Orth, left Austria in the winter of 1889,
purchased and refitted the bark _Santa Margarita_, had her taken to
England, and there joined her with his operetta wife. He sailed for
Buenos Aires in the early spring, with a cargo of cement, and reached
the Rio de la Plata in May. His wife went ahead by steamer to join him
at Buenos Aires.
I quote here, from the same source as the preceding, part of a last
letter from John Orth to his mother at Gmünden: